Hitachi (http://www.hitachigst.com) has announced its new 500GB, 5,400 RPM Travelstar Z5K500 drive — a one-disk, 7 millimeter (mm) z-height hard disk drive (HDD).
The drives feature 1.8 watts read/write power and 0.55W low power idle, and purportedly deliver a nearly silent operation at 1.9 idle / 2.1 seek bels. All Travelstar Z5K500 drives feature an 8MB cache and a Serial ATA 3Gb per second interface. They are also Hitachi’s second generation Advanced Format drive, which increases the physical sector size on HDDs from 512 bytes to 4,096 (4K) bytes, thereby improving drive capacity and error correction capabilities.
All Hitachi Z-series 7mm drives feature common connectors and mounting points for standard integration into existing systems. They feature optional bulk data encryption (BDE) for hard drive level data security.
The 500GB G-Technology G-Drive slim will be shipping to retailers in early 2011. Pricing hasn’t been announced.
